Paul Goodman published Growing Up Absurd in 1960 and Compulsory Mis-Education and Community of Scholars as a single volume in 1962. These were my first years as a Bah?'? and the beginning of my pioneer-travel-teaching life, little did I know it at the time as I struggled through my last years of high school and enjoyed the pleasures of success in sport. While at university in the years 1963 to 1966 I may have come across these books of Paul Goodman, although I can not recall now exactly when I read them. Perhaps I did not read them until I was a teacher-teacher in the early 1970s in Tasmania or a lecturer in the social-sciences in those same years. These books are part of a literary and intellectual miasma, a complex, fascinating but partly poisonous brew from which, within which, I slowly sought to distill a cup of pure and limpid water. Now, as I look back after thirty years(1979-2009) at those first two decades of serious reading, 1959 to 1979, I can see the first traces of my efforts to acquire that first attribute of perfection: ?learning and the cultural attainments of the mind.?1 ?Ron Price with apprecation to 1??Abdu?l-Bah?, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970(1927), p.35.

You certainly churned-out a prolixquantity of stuff, Paul. I rememberyour work on the periphery of mybrain somewhere in my amygdalaand my hippocampi where all mymemories are recorded, fear andconscious thought, emotions arecontrolled, emotionally chargedevents are set for life and I can bring them back to life as if theywere yesterday. I?ve lived longerthan you, Paul.1 You did so muchin your short sixty years?givingGestalt therapy a kick-start backthen when I was a child/adolescent.2

Yes, losing ourselves in learning,creation and our craft is the wayto become something, contributeto civilization with gifts of spirit.

1 Goodman lived to the age of 61(1911-1972); I have already outlived him by four years.2 Goodman is remembered as a co-founder of Gestalt therapy in the 1940s and 1950s.